


The Food Is Probably a Metaphor

by innie



Category: Ant-Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bisexual Character, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-04-23 19:54:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19157875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/innie/pseuds/innie
Summary: Why is there food around every time Scott makes a fool of himself in front of Agent Woo (aka Weekend Woo, After-Hours Woo, DJ Woo, and Jimmy)?





	The Food Is Probably a Metaphor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rivulet027](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rivulet027/gifts).



> I'd missed _Ant-Man and the Wasp_ in theaters but heard it was worth watching, so I did and then signed up to write it for the exchange. I'm so glad I got this assignment!

To be totally fair, Scott had had an inkling that he swung every which way before all of the action had gone down in Germany and he'd made close personal contact with Captain America's wicked guns (things happened in fights) and tight buns (he would swear on Cassie's life that goosing Cap had been a total accident). It wasn't even Badass, aka Falcon, aka Sam Wilson, who'd tripped that switch a few years earlier, because fine as the dude was, Scott had been more concerned about getting inside his suit-pack than getting in his pants. (As an aside, though, if he ever did concentrate full-time on growing some facial hair, Sam would be his first call, because that guy kept it _tight_ — his goatee was a goddamn work of art.)

And to be even fairer, he'd had _two years_ of house arrest to get used to Agent Woo's broad shoulders and aw-shucks smile and unbelievably active eyebrows. But he wasn't used to seeing them _in the wild_.

Grocery shopping seemed like a reasonable adventure to go on in the first week of probation and he was looking forward to hearing how to pronounce açai (because the Safeway delivery dudes had zero inclination to enable his pursuit of knowledge) and seeing if any new characters had joined the holy trinity of Franken Berry, Boo Berry, and Count Chocula (because the Safeway overlords had zero inclination to enable his pursuit of sugar for breakfast) and that was when he saw Weekend Woo. Weekend Woo had rippling biceps under his teal polo shirt, was improbably working some serious dad jeans, and had a basket full of produce and fiber and all the stuff he was probably going to get a gold star on his next physical for eating hooked over his veined forearm. Scott watched him put a pineapple on the conveyor belt and felt like his heart and his stomach had switched places.

So, no, Scott wasn't new to crushing on a dude, but having this kind of reaction to the FBI agent that he probably had to report to once a week for the next three years was a bad idea on a scale that he couldn't even imagine, and he'd done the quantum thing (fuck you, Scott Bakula, it was nothing like a leap) more times than anyone else.

Nah, but he was _Ant-Man_ , he was Luis's Scotty, he was Cassie's dad-hero — he had this, he could totally play it cool. Yeah. All he had to do was not knock over the pyramid of cans that he'd seen (they still made cocktail weenies! and Safeway, in their infinite wisdom, had seen fit to keep that from him!) when he walked in, and he'd be golden.

Okay, so he'd settle for silver.

*

Two years of house arrest was hell on the old chompers, and he was maybe being a little bit of a baby about having to go to the dentist. "Mine gives me stickers," Cassie informed him as they ate canned pineapple and waited for their homemade pizza (grocery stores sold the dough — what a time to be alive!) to finish baking.

"Mine won't." He handed her one oven mitt and took the other for himself and instigated a sudden-death round of pattycake. "Be a better flosser than your old man, peanut."

"Okay, Daddy," she said agreeably. "We should probably have some vegetables or something."

"What do you call this?" he asked.

"I call pineapple a fruit."

"Touché."

She laughed, and he was struck all over again by how lucky he was, that even though things with Maggie had fallen apart, they were at a good enough place that they could raise this amazing child together. And with Paxton. And with Luis. And with Anton batting clean-up.

"Hey, if you have any homework, now would be a good time to get it done," he reminded her. "Cause we're going for ice cream after dinner and then catching up on _Cosmos_." His little girl was a STEM kid, all the way. And nice enough to bring her math homework to his house on their weekends together to let him feel like he was helping. "Lowest common denominator" was not just a catchphrase (or, for some people, a way of life) but an actual thing that existed in the world, and he got to explain it to her.

The doorbell rang when they were getting into fractional equivalents and there were only a couple of minutes left on the oven timer. He swung the door open and there was Agent Woo, all buttoned up and proper, standing on his porch and checking his watch. Scott reined in his dopiest grin but still brought shame on House Lang by saying, "Woo! _Whooooo!_ "

Woo was wearing a disbelieving expression he'd be seeing in his nightmares for years to come, but he said politely, "I'm here to discuss how your parole is going to go. May I come in?"

"Yeah, of course, man. Mi casa es . . . Cassie's casa." Saved that one, and then the oven timer went off like a million air-raid sirens at once. He pulled the pizza out of the oven and set it on the stovetop to cool. "Do you want to stay for dinner?"

Cassie's little head lifted at that, wearing a thoughtful frown, and shit, he'd have to clear anything that went down with her first before any going down . . . goings _on_ . . . happened. 

Woo looked equally surprised. "I didn't mean to interrupt. I thought you had Cassie next weekend."

Woo knew his custody arrangements? When he was still wearing the ankle monitor, sure, but now that he'd been a free man for a day and a half? "No, Paxton scored tickets to . . . something, can't remember what, but it's at the Fillmore, and so we swapped."

"I understand," Woo said, and turned to go. "I'll reach out in the next few days."

"You really can stay, man," he said, all casual. Except that Cassie was giving him a thumbs-up, so he obviously wasn't nearly as subtle as he'd hoped. Woo shook his head and Scott, unable to turn off his mouth that for some reason was leaking like a faucet, followed him back to the front door and said, "It really was good to see you."

And _holy shit_ did he get a lesson then. He thought he'd been used to Agent Woo's professional observation, the quick but thorough visual pat-down that Woo used every time he raided the house, but _this_ was _aaaalllll_ Weekend Woo, who let his eyes meet Scott's own and then drop down to drag slowly and carefully over every inch of him. "We'll do this again real soon," DJ Woo said, pouring that sultry vibe into his voice like he spun only the sexiest soul classics, and then was out the door.

Scott leaned back against the door, weak in the knees, because okay, he had a thing for a guy who was a goddamn boss even in his off hours, and Cassie came out to check on him. "Sometimes my legs don't work right either," she said, patting his knee consolingly because he had the best kid on the planet and she was the cutest thing this side of a quark. He went whole hog and slumped all the way down, sitting on the floor with his back to the door, and she went with him. "I got the plates out," she informed him after a moment of sympathetic silence. "And I turned the oven off."

"You have the best ideas," he told her.

*

He had totally wasted most of the two years of house arrest — not to mention the apron Maggie had gotten him to commemorate his nearly chopping off a finger when he was trying to impress her that said _I'm a looker not a cooker_ — when he could have pulled a _Julie & Julia_ and learned to cook properly instead of relying on Luis's mother-hen tendencies and the proximity of eight Asian restaurants to his house so that he basically had all the phở tái and barbecued pork he could want. He pulled up a recipe for boeuf bourguignon, because the blog promised that it was ridiculously easy and could be finished in the oven so that he wouldn't be stressed and sweaty when it came time to sit down to dinner with a handsome man.

He had only like three of the ingredients, but he could go back to the grocery store — or a different one if they were still sore about the weenie incident — and pick up everything he needed in twenty minutes. Thirty, if he stopped for a good bottle of wine that After-Hours Woo would be powerless to turn down.

Look at him, adulting like a champ, with a recipe and a plan and everything. He would have headed out and tackled it immediately, but the only adult advice he ever remembered was never to go grocery shopping when hungry, or else the whole store would end up in his cart. So he poured out the last of the Count Chocula and some almond milk and settled on the couch. Halfway through the mug — Cassie had made him a mug the size of his head in her school art class — and just when he was getting really into the _Law & Order_ ep and figuring out not only who the murderer was but also, more impressively, where he'd seen all the actors before _without_ resorting to IMDb, the doorbell rang.

He was getting pretty awesome at making up rich inner lives for all the characters he played when it was Jehovah's Witnesses or people encouraging him to vote — which, he totally would, but being on parole kind of put a damper on that — at the door. But the milk had just gotten really good and chocolatey and the cereal was still crunchy enough, so maybe he'd go to the door as himself and keep eating. Which was why he was dripping brown milk into his mug when he swung the door open and saw Agent Woo.

Basically all he needed was for a parade of zits to pop up right in the middle of his forehead, his clothes to fall off, or to choke on his cereal for him to have to start the stopwatch again on days he'd gone without embarrassing himself when it came to this man. Only one of the three actually happened, but still, he was _so terrible_. "Woo!" he said when he swallowed successfully, got air circulating again, and could stop hunching over like Quasimodo. Ooh, he could have learned bell ringing to go along with the drumming.

"You know, you can call me Jimmy," Woo said. "May I come in?"

"Isn't 'Jimmy' a little informal for my parole officer?"

Woo looked seriously confused and seriously cute. "Your parole —? Scott, I'm an FBI agent. I can't take on being a parole officer in addition to my regular responsibilities."

"Oh." That kind of did make sense, though years of faithful _Law & Order_ watching had totally let him down. Maybe they got into that kind of minutiae in the spin-offs.

"And besides, I wouldn't want to see you in that capacity."

Well, that was hurtful. "And on that note, come on in," he said, no longer regretting his robe, boxers, and slippers combo.

"I mean because I'd like to see you personally," Woo said, stepping in and closing the door behind him. "I do want to take you to dinner and to parties and hear all your stories about Cap," he continued, gesturing at the crotch in his eyeline and Scott looked down and was reminded that he was wearing his Captain America boxers that had a star over his junk and stripes covering his badonkadonk.

"Are you — are you serious?" Why was there never a table around when he needed to put something down? Why was he still holding Cassie's mug and eating sugar cereal like he was five years old?

"Is that something you would like too?" And how was Woo staying so cool and collected like he wasn't upending an innocent man's life? "There's paperwork for that," Woo continued, waving a manila folder.

"Yes!" he blurted out, which made him sound really weirdly enthusiastic about paperwork, but Woo got what he was saying, grabbed the mug and put both it and the folder on the stairs, and pounced. 

God, he was right, Woo was a total boss. Being kissed like this — by Agent Woo loosening up into After-Hours Woo who segued into DJ Woo with a little growl (that basically lit his shorts on fire) and then turned sweet as Weekend Woo entered the game and then all of them were _Jimmy_ , kissing him like a champ — was worth any amount of paperwork, even if it had to be filled out in triplicate.

*

"Yo, check it, check it," Luis said. "Shout out to my cousin Eladio for hooking us up with this sweet space — you the man, bro — and props to XCON Security Consultants for staying in the black for its whole first year!" He raised a glass of rosé and grinned.

Everybody in the audience cheered. Since the audience was basically six people, it was pretty quiet, but Scott thought it was heartfelt and anyway the private garden wasn't that big. "Scotty, come on up and say something!"

"You tell all my stories better than me," he demurred, not wanting to get up when he was all comfy with Jimmy's arm around his shoulders. "You can tell this one."

"For real?" Luis lit up when he nodded lazily. "So it's the end of house arrest for my boy Scotty and then he's all, yeah, I'm getting my ankle monitor off, how you like me now, and hey Agent Woo, how _you_ doin'?, and feeling totally fly and shit, and then HOLD UP, Jimmy's all, ain't _no one_ ever done elevator eyes the way I do them, this is SERIOUS BUSINESS, and Scotty's all swooning hardcore, like buckling knees and the whole hundred yards, because nothing is actually nine yards, what is that shit?"

"Wait, what are you doing?" he yelped (manliest yelp of all time) and shook off Jimmy's arm to go clap his hand over Luis's big mouth. It probably helped that Jimmy was laughing too hard to stay upright. "I meant tell the story of XCON!"

"Everybody here knows that story, Scotty," Luis said around Scott's hand.

"You all know about me and Jimmy too!"

"But you guys are mad cute, bro. I'm just giving the people what they want to hear."

"Is good story!" Kurt said, and the tiny old lady next to him, who had to be his grandmother, let out a piercing wolf-whistle.

Dave, nestled between his twin dates — he swore he'd thought there was only one woman who went by a couple of different names and it wasn't his place to pry into her lifestyle choices — said, "Dime goes in, whole story gotta spin."

"My flow got interrupted," Luis said. "I gotta take it from the top."


End file.
